Part-Time Integrated Clinical Education in Dpt Education: Prevalence and Effectiveness in Developing Foundational Skills
Purpose:
As the number of DPT programs and class sizes continue to increase, student placements for quality clinical education experiences have become increasingly more challenging. In an effort to address CAPTE requirements that all students be exposed to a variety of clinical settings and patients across the lifespan, many DPT programs have looked for innovative ways to meet these increasing clinical education challenges. While many programs have chosen to decrease the number of full time clinical experiences students participate in, the use of Pro bono clinical experiences, service learning opportunities, and part-time integrated clinical education (ICE) have become more popular. This study aims to identify the prevalence and structure of part-time integrated clinical education experiences among CAPTE accredited DPT programs, and explore the assessment methods being used to determine the effectiveness of part-time integrated clinical experiences to meet specific program identified objectives.
Methods/Description:
Following an in-depth literature search which revealed limited published information on specific structure or assessment of part-time ICE, a twenty-one question survey of multiple choice questions was developed, including geographical information, and self-identification of the program as part of a public or private institution. This survey was distributed electronically to Directors/Academic Coordinators of Clinical Education of the 242 current CAPTE accredited physical therapy programs in the United States. Nine emails were returned as undelivered, with an assumption that 233 electronic invitations were successfully received by recipients.
Results/Outcomes:
A total of 128 surveys were completed between December 2018 and March 2019, representing a response rate of 55% of delivered surveys, with a completion rate of 88.28% of all individuals who opened the survey. Survey responses were almost equally distributed across public and private institutions, and were well distributed across geographical regions of the United States. Preliminary review of survey results revealed that the most significant changes in clinical education curriculum across all DPT programs have occurred in the past four years, with clinical placement challenges being identified as the number one reason for these curricular changes. More than 75% of schools reported student involvement in some type of Pro bono experience, and 85% reported having at least one part-time integrated clinical education experience in their clinical education curriculum. The number of part-time ICE experiences, placement within the curriculum, actual structure, types of clinical settings, educational objectives, and assessment of these experiences varied greatly among programs.
Conclusions/Relevance to the conference theme:
This study has confirmed that use of part-time ICE experiences and Pro-bono experiences are becoming more wide spread in DPT education as programs attempt to address increasing challenges of student placements, while also providing students’ exposure to varied patient populations and settings. Currently there is limited published literature on how we, as a profession, are assessing the effectiveness of these new part-time integrated clinical education models, and if there is a best practice model to guide curricular development across DPT programs. We believe this is the first study of its kind looking at the overall prevalence and varied structure of these part-time integrated experiences, and it is hopefully that this study will provide some guidance, or at least insight, into the various structures and assessments currently being used by CAPTE accredited DPT programs in the United States.